…chasing joy when life is hard.

Month: March 2016

Attention, attention: You are going to stop whatever you’re doing to read this post. Not because it is eloquently written but because it’s my new FAVORITE thing. Of. All. Time.

About a month or so ago, I discovered a small etsy shop called Hosanna Revival . Katie custom paints bibles. I instantly fell in love with her style. I feel pretty sure you will too.
My new bible is an ESV journaling bible that has been recovered by Katie and was customized with the colors, scriptures, and design that I chose. The Bible cost me under $65 shipped. In my opinion, this is well worth the price!

Hosanna Revival is all about “exciting women about the Word by making the actual book as beautiful and personal as the words inside of it.”
Oh. My. Word. I am in love.
FYI: I’m receiving no kind of compensation for this. I just really love this Bible!

I want my house to look like one you would see in a darling little neighborhood in Waco, Texas.

I want my kids to have adorable matching ensembles for Easter so that I can capture that perfect candid shot before we all happily make our way to the Easter Sunday service. Early. (Never mind that they’re 18 and 15 years old. I still want them in pastels I picked up at Gymboree. Let me dream, okay?)

I want to create meals from scratch with all organic ingredients that were gathered at my local farmer’s market.

But…that is not my life.

My life looks like three loads of unfolded laundry covering my lovely new love seat.

My life is pizza delivered and Sonic happy hour 99 cent corn dogs.

My life is opening a cute little Easter banner purchased at Target and finding this.

Life is not perfect. For anyone. But we each get to decide what we will do, how we will react when we are faced with all those pesky imperfections.

I’ve decided to be like Max. My puppy embraces the imperfect. In fact, he revels in it.

What if, instead of constantly trying harder, we choose to accept and even embrace the imperfections of our lives? What if we gave ourselves some grace? What if we decided that “Happa Easter” is really quite funny, especially when your 15 year old adopts it as his new holiday greeting and sounds much like a mobster when he says it?

Sometimes joy can’t be found until we let go of something. For me, it’s the striving and straining, the constant need for perfection from myself and those closest to me.

So this day, I resolve to let go of the things that don’t matter. I choose to embrace the imperfections. I choose to count it all joy.

Let this be my prayer, my goal in this, to:

“Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you at all sides.” James 1:2 MSG

It happened on a Sunday afternoon. I knew I should have opted for the nap. Instead I found myself surrounded. Held captive by two little people with pleading eyes and a love of the game. Endless choices. Would it be Life, Monopoly, or the favorite family classic…Scene IT Disney edition?
How could I have known? Could this travesty have been prevented? Only God knows.
Scrabble. We had never attempted the likes of Scrabble before. Scrabble was reserved for people with a modicum of intelligence. Individuals whose vocabulary went beyond “poop” and “fart”. But being the fantabulous edu-funtational mom that I am, I suggested it. How hard could it be? So we would use smaller words…We could do this thing. I knew we could. We would conquer Scrabble, and prove our intelligence to one another and the world beyond.
I was wrong. So very very wrong. I learned an important lesson that day. A lesson I shall never forget.
Naps are good. Scrabble is bad…especially when playing with a seven year old who can’t spell.

**I wrote this poem in response to the compassion that wells up within me for the people I serve every day, people who struggle with mental illness. It began as my call to action, but as it took shape on paper I realized that I am not capable of doing these things. Only Christ in me can. So this is how I desire to be, but reading it back now, I come to realize that this is what HE does for us all every day of our lives.

It’s Friday…and the end of most of the area’s spring break. My kids will go back to school on Monday…but I won’t. I teach special needs students in a program that goes to school year round. That means I get more time off throughout the year. Instead of one week for spring break…I get two! Hooray!

I have an extensive to-do list for the next week, but I’ve made sure to include some fun things too. One of those fun activities is the highlight of my favorite things Friday post this week- to get up-to-date in creating project life pages.

Only in the last year have I come to know, appreciate, and love Becky Higgins and Project Life. Sure, she doesn’t know who I am (which makes the previous statement only slightly creepy and stalkerish), but Project Life has totally changed how I scrapbook.

Now, let’s be clear…I haven’t scrapbooked in the past 10 years. It’s just sooooo much work and hassle. You have to pull out a gazillion pens, papers, cutters, stamps, stamp pads, washi tapes, glue, and on and on and on. Can you read the exasperation in those last few sentences? By the time I would pull everything out and make a disastrous mess of my kitchen table, I would be so over it. I just don’t have time for that.

Y’all. This app is AMAZING. I can’t sing its praises enough. I can create while waiting on my kids after school. In my car. I can scrapbook in my car. Let that sink in. I can lay in my bed and create this (which I totally did):

I can then post it to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, whatever….immediately!

Within 5 minutes, y’all! Can you tell I get excited about this?!

So let’s talk about cost…

The app itself is 2.99 regularly. They often lower the price to .99 (I got it at this price). However, I believe that the 2.99 price is well worth it.

A few kits come free with the app…but all the kits are priced at 1.99 or .99. I know that some people don’t like to spend on apps, but when I consider the amount of money I’ve sunk on scrap booking supplies over the years….well, this is a tiny fraction of that cost.

The app now has the capability of ordering prints directly. I love this! I usually wait to order until I have a good sized order since there’s a flat $5 shipping rate. 12 x 12 prints are 1.99 and 8 x 8s are .99. I printed all our Disney layouts in an 8×8 format and I couldn’t be happier with it. The quality is fantastic!

The Disney 8×8 pages

Last summer I did a page layout for each week during the summer. I took about 10 minutes each Sunday afternoon to create a page. Most of that time was spent narrowing down what pictures to use. Easy peasy!
These are my 12×12 layouts. I plan to do one album for each year. I’m actually excited about documenting our lives again. This just makes it so easy.
I am also currently working on small albums for each of the five students in my class, and I’m thrilled with how the project is turning out. Obviously, due to privacy, I can’t share those here.

Project Life did not endorse or pay me a thing to write this post. I just love it and wanted to share the love. 🙂
I’ll leave you with a few of my most favorite pages that I’ve created:

If you have any questions…please ask in the comments. I would love to connect with other project lifers!

Tonight I went out for a girls’ night with my bestie and my daughter. We went out for dinner and to a movie.
(Side note: Can I tell you how happy/crazy it makes me to have an “adult” daughter? Crazy…can we really be here? Where’d my baby girl go?! Happy…we are really beginning to get to a place where we can enjoy each other’s companies as women. That is exciting!)

So…Girls’ night: What is it?

I’m sure that if I put 50 women in a room and asked this question, I would have 50 different answers. To every woman, girls’ night can mean a different thing. For the young mom, it can simply be a break from diapers and dishes. For a widow, it can be the antidote for the loneliness she’s experiencing.

Girls’ night is for every woman. And it can be anything from a weekend getaway to a quick coffee. The common thread is women…just women gathering. No husbands. No kids (even though I broke this rule last night). No boyfriends. No dishes. No homework. No laundry.

Why is it so important?

I asked Grace (daughter) and Kim (bestie) this question at dinner last night. This has been on my mind a lot lately, mainly because I’ve neglected this area of my life over the past few months (at the very least). Girls, may I encourage you? We need each other. Comparison and envy come easy…if we are honest enough to admit it. Women are so hard on themselves and one another. It’s time we give each other grace. It’s time we love each other. It’s time we enjoy each other.

Jesus commands it in John 15:

“My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” Verse 12 (NIV)

Our Girls’ Night:

For my local friends, here’s what we did tonight:

Dinner at a “new to us” local Italian place, Rotolo’s, and fun conversation…

After dinner, we zipped back up the road to Target for coffee and end-cap clearance browsing since we had a little time to kill before our movie started. This is pretty much the best idea I have for a girls’ night (if you’re me!). Coffee and Target. Sigh. It speaks my love language.

It’s come to my attention that many people don’t know about this little entertainment tidbit…so I’ll share it with you. If you live near a Studio Movie Grill, this is for you. Every month, SMG hosts a girl’s night out movie. Tickets are only $3…yes, heard me right! $3! They are on Wednesday nights at 7:30pm. It’s always a classic movie. We saw Sixteen Candles…last month the movie was Ghost.

Here’s a screenshot I took of the upcoming movies…

You can also see them here along with the other film series. I am very impressed with our new Studio Movie Grill for offering these different Classic movies at such a low cost. It makes the opportunity for girls night/ family nights/date nights more accessible to more people.

More Girls’ Night ideas…

Coffee (or Sonic happy hour…if coffee’s not your thing). This is one of our favorites. Sometimes we get coffee and drive around talking and solving the world’s problems (not really) and venting. Let me tell you…there’s nothing better (apart from Jesus) than to have a trusted friend who you can share your ugliest, rawest thoughts with.

GET AWAY. If you can afford it, run away with your girls for a weekend. I’m dreaming about one of these…who’s in?!

Enjoy a hobby together. Kim and I train and run together. We are planning to run a half marathon together in May. What do you both enjoy? Make time to do it together!

Feed your soul: just recently I stepped way out of my comfort zone and attended a women’s conference called IF (you can read more about it here. I only knew one other person, but God blessed that time and I met some lovely new friends.

How do you connect with other women on a regular basis? Share in the comments…I want to know your secrets!

My faith journal isn’t perfect or worthy of some magnificent art award, but isn’t that the point? Lately across Pinterest, I see these amazing works of art that people are creating in and over their bibles. I am in no way against those, but I have caught myself coveting the ability to create these beautiful works of art.

I had to ask myself this question: who is this for? Why do this bible journaling? Is it for me? Is it for Him? The answer is both. It gives me a chance to meditate on God’s word and worship in a unique and deeply personal method. It is not for others to look and think more highly of me and my abilities.

I love my faith journal. I love to look back on these scriptures and remember why it was so meaningful to me.

In all my failures, God still chooses to delight in me! He chooses to rescues me. That rocks me to my core. When I am down on myself and feeling worthless, I look at this word from God and know that I am loved…delighted in…rescued.